The Whole Life Dashboard
Get in alignment with this transformational tool that helps you focus on your most important goals
Over many decades, I have found one consistent difference between people who achieve their goals and people who live with regrets: alignment. Achieving your goals requires aligning your daily actions around building toward what you want most, rather than wasting time on things that don’t matter.
I used to face challenges with alignment until I developed a tool to address it: The Whole Life Dashboard (WLD). It’s inspired by the same planning and alignment process companies use in valuable management systems like EOS and Gazelles.
Here’s how it works.
The WLD lays out your most important goals, relationships and habits in one place that you can easily review each morning. When you review the dashboard for just a few minutes each day, you’ll shift from starting your day in a reactive mode by responding to emails and messages, to being in a proactive mode where you pick the few priorities that will move you towards your most important goals.
Here are a few of the components of the WLD:
Core Purpose and Core Values: At the top of the WLD is your Core Purpose and Core Values. Reading these each morning will remind you of why you do what you do and energize you for the day ahead.
Goal Waterfall: Up next are your goals for the year, which are further broken down into quarterly daily priorities. Each goal is broken into manageable chunks that can be done on a daily basis.
Relationship Dashboard: A Relationship Dashboard will remind you to reach out to people you want to get closer to, rather than letting months pass without a touchpoint.
Visualizations and Affirmations: Focusing on these for a moment each day will remind you what you’re chasing.
Long-Term Goals: This is where your three-, five- and ten-year goals go. These form the basis of your annual goals and keep you focused on the big picture.
The Whole Life Dashboard works because it creates the necessary alignment between the big picture of your life and what you do each day. It also serves as a vital accountability tool that prompts you to check off whether you accomplished the previous day’s priorities.
Here’s how to get started with the WLD.
Download the WLD template and set aside an hour in your calendar to fill it out—there are detailed instructions for doing so in the template. If you get stuck while brainstorming your Core Values, check out my hour-long course on the topic.
Set aside 5-10 minutes each morning to review your dashboard, making sure to pick your three priorities for the day. Note how many of your daily priorities you accomplished the day before and how many daily habits you executed.
At the end of each quarter (end of March, June, September and December), check your progress against your quarterly and annual goals and write your priorities for the next quarter.
At the end of each year, update your long-term goals and choose your annual goals for the upcoming year to repeat the cycle.
Get started today by downloading the WLD template, available at this page.
This is part of the Friday Forward Resource Vault, where Robert Glazer shares the best resources and frameworks leaders can use to keep raising their game. Join Friday Forward Premium for access to the full vault.